Family Myths: How Kinship Colors Reality

November 15, 1985|By Glenn Collins, New York Times

NEW YORK — Most families have their legends, their dreams and their illusions. But researchers who have been studying family myths are gaining greater understanding of their power to influence behavior. This knowledge has given therapists new techniques for helping problem families.

''Understanding such myths can give us a great deal of crucial information about families,'' said Dr. Stephen A. Anderson, a therapist in the School of Family Studies at the University of Connecticut.

Anderson defined family myths as a series of beliefs shared by all the members of a family. These beliefs not only prescribe the roles that members play but also determine the pattern of their relationships.

He presented his findings about family myths along with two other researchers, Dr. Dennis A. Bagarozzi and Dr. Morton S. Perlmutter, at the recent annual meeting of the American Association for Marriage and Family Therapy, a gathering of 3,200 therapists in Manhattan.

''You know you have encountered a family myth,'' said Bagarozzi, ''when everyone resists your interpretation. For example, everyone in a family may say that Grandpa is the boss, and yet it's obvious from your study of the family that Grandma really runs the show. Yet when you tell the family that, no one will accept your interpretation. Then you know you have a family myth.''

Anderson said: ''To the members of the families themselves, these myths appear to be an accurate reflection of themselves. To an outsider, they may seem quite distorted.''

Often these family beliefs and roles go unchallenged by all members in spite of the distortions of reality required for the myth to remain intact.

Some family myths can be benign, said Bagarozzi, an Atlanta therapist who began researching such myths while he taught at Kansas State University. ''For example,'' he said, ''the myth that whatever occurs in the family, no matter how bad it is, can be overcome. That is a useful, functional, evolutionary myth.''

But some family myths are far from benign and may be ''toxic,'' Anderson said. ''For example,'' he said, ''the central belief of some families is that life is fraught with danger, despair and futility.''

Some myths, though they may ultimately be destructive to family members, serve the important function of providing an immediate solution to unacknowledged problems.

Bagarozzi told of a couple he treated that had been referred to him after sex therapy was ineffective. ''They were both in agreement that their problem was the husband's loss of sexual desire for his wife,'' Dr. Bagarozzi said.

However, during the course of therapy, it became apparent ''that there was an underlying problem,'' he continued.

''On a conscious level,'' he said, ''the wife's myth was that 'I am a sexual person and my husband won't satisfy me.' But in fact, her personal history and her own family mythology had taught her that sex was bad. Her real feeling was: 'I am bad for having sex.' ''

In therapy, it became clear that the husband, too, was uncomfortable with his own sexuality, and that his wife's avoidance of sex made it easier for him not to deal with his own insecurities. ''In accepting the shared myth, both partners had found a solution to protect each other,'' Bagarozzi said. It was, however, a solution that not only denied the couple satisfaction, but had also placed great strain on their marriage.

The genesis of family myth-making ''is a complex process that involves personal, conjugal and family myths,'' Bagarozzi said. ''Somehow, the family comes to a consensus about itself.''

Only recently has mythology been applied to the therapeutic treatment of families. Anderson said that the term ''family myth'' was coined by Antonio Ferreira, author of a 1963 study published by the American Psychiatric Association.

''Frequently personal and familial myths are reflections of greater social myths,'' said Perlmutter, a therapist and researcher at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. He began giving increasing attention to family myths after research colleagues asked him to contribute to a study of the mythologies of large corporations and how they disseminated those myths through advertising.

Families' mythologies can be relatively flexible or quite rigid, the researchers said. ''Families can assimilate new experiences of the family or its members into an existing family myth,'' Anderson said, ''or they can accommodate the myth to conform to new conditions, or they can even invent a new myth.''

In their therapy, Anderson and Bagarozzi have sometimes worked with families in eliciting their shared mythology and the symbolic meanings of it for family members, then helped the families to change not just their mythology but also their behavior. They are writing a book based on their research and therapeutic techniques.

Perlmutter is writing a book, too, about family mythology. ''In our work with families,'' Perlmutter said, ''we began to observe that some families would tell stories about themselves again and again, and those stories seemed well rehearsed. The therapists would become caught in the middle of the myth and in a few minutes we'd be lost: That's how powerful the myths were.''

Perlmutter, who has studied the patterns of hypnotic trance states in therapy, believes that some of the power of these myths is explainable by the trance phenomenon.

At times, according to his theory, families may place themselves in a shared hypnotic state. When videotaped and observed during the telling of family myths, they display the same rhythmic respiration patterns, glazed eyes and shared intensity, all classic signs of trance. ''This is not mystical in any sense,'' Perlmutter said. ''It is just another kind of consciousness.''